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The biggest advertising mystery about Super Bowl XLIX on February 1 remains: What will Chrysler do?

Fiat Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois hasn't tipped his hand yet about how his company will follow up its four-year string of impactful TV ads that began with the now-iconic, two-minute Eminem "Born of Fire" commercial during the Super Bowl in 2011. There's no reason to think that Fiat Chrysler's brands won't show up at all this year.

But a number of other car brands already have indicated that they're staying on the sidelines of the NBC broadcast from Phoenix. This is a big deal for the Super Bowl because carmakers comprise the biggest category of advertiser and have fed bountifully at the Big Game trough for the last several years. And car brands have been responsible for many of the iconic commercial moments of the last few Super Bowls.

So far, Volkswagen, Jaguar and Lincoln have said to count them out of this season's Super Bowl. Each brand has its own rationale for spending—or saving—the $4 million per 30-second spot that Super Bowl advertising now commands.

For its part, Volkswagen hit a rough patch in the U.S. market in 2014, partly because it hasn't had a major new model to promote. The automaker is also planning to apply its money to other things, like the nearly $100 billion it has just committed to spending on new models, technologies and production facilities in the next five years.

Yet Volkswagen's exit can only be described as stunning. Despite creating one of the best-recalled Super Bowl spots in recent years with the Little Darth Vader "The Force" spot and last year debuting "Wings" on Game Day, marking its fifth consecutive Super Bowl spot, Volkswagen is clipping its wings and sitting out the Super Bowl advertising derby for 2015.

The move isn't entirely a surprise, however. Volkswagen's U.S. sales leveled off notably last year after three years of double-digit-percentage growth, as the brand ran out of significant new-product introductions. It also has been trimming marketing expenses overall. Under those circumstances, this year's launch of the new seventh-generation Golf apparently doesn't reach the Super Bowl-advertising threshold.

The absence of Lincoln from Super Bowl XLIX also is understandable given that Ford has spent much of the last two years, including last year's Super Bowl, reintroducing and relaunching the Lincoln brand. Now it's mainly a matter of getting Lincoln's promised string of new products into the marketplace over the next few years.